


Open For Me

by Tsundere_Icecream



Category: Original - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-02 22:21:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14554770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tsundere_Icecream/pseuds/Tsundere_Icecream





	Open For Me

Cold outside but it doesn't matter. 

Heat. 

That familiar scorching heat radiates from John's body like a sun behind him. 

John's hand roams over, under, his shirt, wraps around Sherlock's chest, rough-warm, pulls him closer. So close. 

 

John stretches, shifting. Pulling him closer. Tight close. Knee tucking along under and.

Skin. Warm skin. And his fingers, and. Nuzzling. Nuzzling-nuzzling tasting. Tasting bad, and. John rubs his foot up the scraping hair-rough hard span of his calf and Sherlock kisses him again and John opens, opens, opens, oh, he wants. All of him can he have just. All, and Sherlock's long warmstrong fingers curling on his back as pressed together thighs and faces hardhot together pressed as they—kiss, and—kiss and they are so close they could not get closer and John is rocking-rocks ocean-steady feeling so warm and close and hot so hot with him, for him, with him as Sherlock's tongue slips on his in the shell of their mouths cupped togetherand their. Bodies, with. His vest rucked up wound around his sweaty armpits, and Sherlock makes a little hot sound pressing his prick to John's belly and gasping heart his heart his heart is pounding John's teeth scrape at his—lip—and Sherlock jerks back, clambering off the mattress as John wakes up, blinking: pushing up on an elbow confused in the grey, watery light of Sherlock's shadowed bedroom.

Sherlock is standing by the bed, face startled, posture unsteady. His hair's sticking up every which way and his chin is dark with patchy stubble and his little black shorts are shoved down to his thighs so his erection bobs out bare smeared-shiny from where he'd been rutting it up against John's bare skin. John's hard in his boxers, beneath the duvet. Balls heavy. Skin tight. They'd been kissing. It'd been wonderful. From the other side of the bed Sherlock is staring at John like the two of them've just finished murdering a puppy.

John rubs at his face, hand clumsy. "I. I'm sorry," he says, finally. "I was. Asleep." His voice is rough in his chest and his throat.

"I kissed you first," Sherlock says, a little too fast.

"Mm?" John squints up at him. Sherlock is still staring at him, unmoving. If John slid over the mattress he could get his mouth around him for a bit while he. Just closed his eyes. "D'you want to do it some more?" John asks, "Or"; as Sherlock flushes a bright, luminous red.

"I need to shower," Sherlock says, sounding strangled, and then sidles away 'round the bed and into his en suite, and shuts the door.

After a moment, John rolls over onto his back and stares up at the ceiling.

A minute after that, he says, "Fuck," and then shoves his hand down his pants.

He can hear Sherlock showering. He can—Christ he shouldn't but all he can think about is Sherlock's long warm lithe body and his legs in those stockings and the heaving arches of his ribs and his pebble-tight flushed nipples swelling onto John's tongue and Christ, Christ John wants to just—just sink straight into the tightwethot stretch of his body wrap those long long legs tight 'round his hips while kissing and kissing he rolls his body into Sherlock's as over and over they kiss and they kiss and they—Christ—

John is gasping. Airless and desperate, eyes prickling up, with his cock going soft in his fist.

After a minute, he sits up. Tugs his vest down. Boxers up. The shower is still going in the en suite. Sherlock'll be able to smell it, John knows: come out of his shower flushed and pink and clean-shaven smelling of moisturizer and expensive shampoo and he'll come in to the wreck of his sheets and smell John where John was wanking, desperate, barely awake and still already delirious over Sherlock's bare beautiful body because Sherlock won't just sodding screw him, and fuck it, fuck him, Christ: as John drags on his jeans and his brown shirt over his prickling-waving skin with his mouth dry and his eyeballs hot and gritty; just sod the entire miserable bloody thing!

Heart pounding face hot John strips back the sheet and the duvet so he can tug the bottom sheet, bared, flat and taut. Then he pulls up the top sheet and smoothes it out, the duvet and smoothes it out, and then he redoes Sherlock's hospital corners. Puts the pillows back up. Even at arm's length the pillow on the far side smells like John's shampoo, the way it had smelled—different—on Sherlock's dark, soft hair.

After a shower and a shave he feels better, mostly. Nearly. The rain has stopped. He opens the window in his bedroom and breathes in, and in, and in. When he comes back downstairs Sherlock is in the kitchen scraping a pan into a bowl—and that's hollandaise, Christ, John's a terrible person. Sherlock doesn't even like hollandaise, and he loathes ham. John takes a deep, steadying breath and goes over to him.

"Good morning," he says, quiet. "Can I touch you?"

Sherlock's shoulders hunch up, a bit.

"Nowhere dangerous," John says. Swallows. "Just—your back, or—" and Sherlock sets down the bowl and the whisk and turns around to face him and folds John into a good-smelling, tight-close warm hug.

John breathes. Breathes: wrapping his arms tight 'round Sherlock's warm middle. He tucks his nose down into Sherlock's collar, and breathes him in.

Sherlock's arms are heavy around him. The hitching-slow rise-and-fall of his ribs and John's ribs. "I'm sorry," Sherlock says, very quietly; and John laughs, wretched, thick.

"I know, you're making me eggs benedict, I do remember," he says, "it isn't necessary," as he presses up onto his toes and then—

—remembers.

Sherlock's eyes are nearly level with John's eyes. Sherlock's gaze dropping, just for a moment, to John's mouth, before he takes a half step back.

John settles back down on his heels, and Sherlock's eyes flick back up to meet his.

"Right," John says. "I—sorry, I know you don't want—sorry. Sorry."

"It's all right," Sherlock says, very quietly; and John swallows, heavy and thick.

"It's—it may take me a while," John says. "To not—to not just automatically—"

"It's all right," Sherlock says; and John laughs and says, "It'll probably take me even longer to not just cuddle up to you in the night and try to—Christ."

He rubs his hands over his face, and takes in a long, slow, unsteady breath.

Watching him. Eyes soft with his mouth turned down at the corners Sherlock feels so far away it seems almost hard to actually see him: not—not a person but a snapshot of a person, someone John barely remembers, and can't meet. Absurd. Absurd. Because Sherlock is here, isn't he, watching John's face from an armspan away as he reaches up to brush his thumb, very gently, to the center of John's bottom lip. Like—touching, almost.

Very nearly a kiss.

"I love you," John says. It feels like tossing out—a battered old buoy, a pool float in a storm, a fast-running-out line into the darkness of the ocean; as he watches the far-away rise-and-fall, rise-and-fall of Sherlock's lovely, aching double swallow, before quietly he says, "I love you too."

"But you can't go back to making me high cholesterol breakfasts six times a week," John says, and then laughs a little; and Sherlock bends towards him until their noses touch, their foreheads, and then.

Comes to rest.

John swallows. "Hugging's all right, is it?" he asks, quiet; and against him, once, jerky, Sherlock nods; so John wraps his arms around Sherlock's body and pulls him in so close and tight that between them their clothes feel huge, overmagnified. The Great Wall of Sherlock's tight black button-down. The castle moat he'd given John for his birthday, in the form of a pair of well-tailored dark rinse jeans.

They stand there for a long, long time, until taking a long slow breath in, Sherlock says, very quietly, "Let me finish the breakfast"; and John nods, letting him—a pang—pull away.

"Tea?" John asks, and Sherlock nods, so he sets to it: the familiar, trivial comfort of the weight of the kettle and the curve of the cups and the bone-deep knowledge of how much sugar to stir in to get it just how Sherlock likes it (disgusting, he means): the bittersweet pang of all the love letters John feels like they've spent all year writing, in languages neither of them quite understands. When Sherlock'd come back in November he'd broken into John's flat nearly every day for three weeks, making him and Omar vats of pasta puttanesca; and stacks of sandwiches, wrapped in paper for work; and eggs benedict because he knew it was John's favorite, when it was made properly, which it hardly ever was: as though the reason John hadn't moved back in was that he'd thought he wouldn't be properly fed. Omar didn't eat ham, and his fiancée—another fellow at LSE—had taken an almost comical degree of umbrage over the sandwiches, and then one night John'd wound up lying on the sofa in 221B holding a towel of ice to his bloodied nose while Sherlock, uncharacteristically meticulous, checked over and reloaded John's gun, and then John'd said, When I come home: because the instant just before it'd come out of his mouth, he'd known, with absolute blinding certainty, that he would. The hollandaise is, as always, perfection. Sherlock's has ruined him for anything else.

John's mobile rings, while John is doing the washing up. "It's Greg," John calls, wet to his elbows and covered in dish liquid, "can you—" but Sherlock is already barging back into the kitchen with his toothbrush still clutched in his left hand to snatch John's phone up from beside the draining rack: "Lethraahhbe," Sherlock says, and John slides to the side so that Sherlock can spit his mouthful of toothpaste into the kitchen sink.

There's been a bomb threat. Two, in fact, for this morning; after four the past week that they'd caught in time and one last night where the bomb actually went off, hours before the threat had specified. "That one was in Kew Gardens," Greg explains, slouching just inside their doorway with his hands stuffed into his pockets while Sherlock slides into his coat and John pockets his mobile, his key. They follow him down to the street as Greg is explaining, "At the base of the Treetop Walkway, but it didn't work—all sorts of smoke and a dreadful sort of burning plastic smell, but counter-terrorism've said that whoever's responsible doesn't really know what they're doing. Probably why it went off before the timer."

"I don't find that tremendously reassuring," John says, sliding in after Sherlock to the back of Greg's car.

"You'd be an irredeemable idiot if you did find it reassuring," says Sherlock, then shoots him a look and says, "which": very low.

John shuts the car door behind himself, and clears his throat. "Sally," he says, carefully.

"John," she returns, and waits ignoring Sherlock pointedly while Sherlock ignores her pointedly right back until Greg's done up the passenger side seatbelt, and then eases the car away from the kerb.

"Sergeant Donovan's been herding cats for me all morning, I've not slept since Friday afternoon," Greg says. He sounds uncommonly cheerful about it. "I spent an hour and a half with Donnell trying to get permission to bring you on after the third one, but—"

"Where was that?" Sherlock interrupts.

"What?" Greg twists to look back over his shoulder.

"The third one, where was it, why after the third one, why not—"

"Believe it or not, Sherlock, the Met does deal with bomb threats quite competently, on a regular basis, without your help," Greg says. "It wasn't so much the where—though: Tower Bridge—it was the number. I'd rather not have a serial bomber, even an incompetent one, running about London, if it's all the same. But Donnell didn't think it merited outside help until—"

"Kew Gardens," Sherlock says.

"Right in one," says Greg, "and since DCI Pearson's been asking after you all week..."; and then grabs for a Starbucks takeaway cup, which is steaming coffee sharp-fragrant even into the back seat, and also approximately the size of a beach bucket. It does explain a bit, about his frame of mind.

"So the third's Tower Bridge," Sherlock says. "The rest?"

"The first was Big Ben," Greg answers; Sherlock snorts; "and then it was Covent Garden Market, before Tower Bridge—

"So he's been sticking to big, popular tourist spots, all guaranteed to attract a crowd," Sherlock says.

"We did get that far," Sally says. "But other than the one at Kew Gardens, none of the bombs have been at all dangerous, and the threats have all been for times when the tourists aren't precisely heaving in—middle of the night, or early in the morning; and he went so far as to threaten Westminster Abbey at quarter to nine in the morning and then send a revised note to move the threat to half six instead, and the only thing we can think of was that he'd realized that the hordes started queuing quite early in the day."

"Hang on," John says, "when you say that the bombs aren't dangerous, do you just mean that he's incompetent, or—"

"He's not incompetent, he's aggressively clueless," Sally says. "The first one, from Big Ben, took us seven minutes to find and about half that for the bomb disposal unit to sort out that it didn't even have a detonator. The second, at Covent Garden, he'd stuck in a planter, but it wasn't waterproofed, so the electronics got frazzled before we even got there."

"Hm," says Sherlock.

"The one at Westminster Abbey was my favorite," Greg says. "He'd used some sort of a girl's alarm clock, very princessy, with this sort of... sparkly liquid in its frame like a snow globe, so if it had gone off—which it wouldn't've, he didn't have enough explosives—it would've showered Richard II and Anne of Bohemia with slimy globs of rainbow glitter."

"I can't believe you haven't caught him already," John says, trying not to laugh. Sherlock looks personally offended. "He doesn't sound quite like the criminal underworld's great thinker."

"That's just it," Greg says. "You'd think that, wouldn't you? But in terms of everything other than the bombs themselves, he hasn't made a single mistake: not a witness, not an eyelash, not a partial fingerprint—not so much as a shot of him from the back on CCTV": just as Sally pulls to a stop and Sherlock mutters, "Oh, fabulous"; John leaning against the window to crane his neck up at the lumbering monstrosity of the London Eye.

The entire area is cordoned off, all the way from the bridge, causing an unholy nightmare of foot traffic and gawking overinterest, with an assortment of uniformed constables directing the curious and their smartphones away while constables lead sniffer dogs about and John and Sherlock follow Greg and Sally to the police van they're using as mobile HQ. DCS Donnell, assigned back in 2013 as lead for citizens' interests and transparency in policing, is standing with her arms crossed and a taut, flat half-frown, regarding Sherlock with the same blank unimpressed stare she's turned on him every time they've come face to face since the trials. Greg'd once suggested John try getting into her knickers to put her in a better frame of mind, and in retaliation Sherlock'd broken about three-quarters of the glassware in Greg's depressing divorcé flat. John'd thought it'd been something to do with Paul, at the time.

"Good morning, Mr. Holmes," says Donnell; Sherlock is looking about, squinting, his nose wrinkled up, and not paying attention, so John laughs, a little and holds out a hand.

"Morning, DCS Donnell," he says, as she shakes it, murmuring, "Mr. Watson"; and Sherlock glares at her, then at John, and then turns away with a sniff. Sorry, John mouths, and she quirks a sliver of a smile at him, then immediately goes back to ignoring them both.

"Anything yet?" Greg asks her, and then tilts his head back to take a long, scraping sort of slurp from the very bottom of his Starbucks cup: Christ, if John drank that entire thing his heart would probably dissolve inside him. Sherlock doesn't answer, taking a step away, then another, then another: chin jutting forward, sniffing—hm—as he leans away to look out towards—the park, John thinks. The trees?

"Not yet," Donnell says. "They've been over the whole area with the dogs twice, but they're having the devil of a time, all the dogs keep whining and stopping and looking up at their handlers."

"No chance he's not planted the bomb yet, is there?" Sally asks Greg.

"All the others've been planted well in advance," Greg says, as Sherlock crouches down three meters away, pulling a pair of nitrile gloves out of his coat pocket. John comes over as he pulls them on, Greg saying behind him, "The one in Westminster Abbey was dusty."

Sherlock touches the pavement, then lifts his hand to his face, then holds his fingers out to John. "What do you smell?" he asks, voice low, and so John sniffs cautiously, frowning.

"Sugar?" he says, a little dubiously. "Er—sweets?"

"Maple syrup," Sherlock corrects, and his eyes meet John's—green, electric—then flick down to John's mouth—which parts, dryhollow—and away, as Sherlock pushes up to his feet, clearing his throat, and turns. "Where's the lost-and-found?" he asks Greg.

"The what?"

"The lost-and-found," Sherlock repeats, sharp. "There's no place to hide it properly on the pods so it'll be in the lost-and-found, or still in the toilets, or someone's already found it and stolen it hoping it's—"

"Sir," calls a eager-looking young constable with spots and extraordinary eyelashes, leaning out of the ticket hall: Greg and Sally trot over with John and Sherlock just behind them, inside to where a police dog is snuffling around the base of a big cardboard barrel and whining insistently: Sherlock shoves through the assembled throng and leans in and snatches out a black rucksack before anyone can stop him.

"Jesus—" John shoves towards him, as everyone else is stumbling back: "You're, what are you—" but Sherlock's already plunked the rucksack down on the desk and is opening it up, fishing out an assortment of disposable nappies, a box of wipes, a rubber dummy, and a copy of Lonely Planet Pocket London, before—eyes glittering, mouth curving—he lifts out an oversized plastic fire truck—the sort that makes loud wailing noises so that every adult in earshot will grind their teeth—and hands it to the nearest white-faced flabbergasted constable, all her freckles standing out in sharp relief. "Don't push the button," Sherlock tells her. "I doubt it makes siren sounds when it goes anymore": and the woman backs out of the building with her whole body tense with terror while Sherlock turns back to the rucksack, turning it out to disgorge a few coins, a gear-shaped fob on a ring with two keys, and a melon-scented lip balm—no crumbs. From a parent, John's come to expect crumbs. "Hm," says Sherlock, fondling the straps, the tag at the seam, and then he lifts up the rucksack, and gives it a few long, thoughtful sniffs. He hands it to John: the maple syrup smell is obvious, now that Sherlock's pointed it out. He peers down at the little white tag by the strap—the red maple leaf of the Canadian flag—then holds the rucksack out to Greg, who hands it to Sally, who slips out of the building to join the counter-terrorism officers clustered outside. "Someone's got it out for Canadians?" John asks Sherlock, and Sherlock's mouth quirks.

"What, you don't think it was a Canadian?" he asks.

"In my experience, Canadians don't go about actively coated in maple syrup, no," John says; and Greg snorts as Sherlock's gaze flicks down to the table, up to John's face, then over to the window, then back down to the table and the key ring, which he picks up and turns over, and then over, and then over, the corners of his mouth slowly sliding. A little wrinkle coming in between his brows. "What is it?" John asks; and Sherlock straightens up, and looks straight at Greg. "I need to go back to Baker Street," he says.

"What?" Greg laughs, short. "There was another threat, you know, at—"

"St. Paul's," Sherlock says, "or the British Museum, possibly, doesn't matter, I need to go back to Baker Street"; and Greg just stares at him, mouth hanging open. "What?" Sherlock glares at him. "I do mean immediately, if one of your little minions isn't equipped to give us a lift I'm perfectly capable of getting—"

"The British Museum," Greg says, "but how do—what do you—"

"It's not a negotiation," Sherlock snaps, "I need to go back to Baker Street. If you want to catch him before he torches a major London tourist site by accident I expect you want me to go back to Baker Street as well": and Greg turns and sticks his head out the door, and shouts, "Jacobs!"

DS Jacobs, on loan from DI Howlitzer on a Sunday and clearly none too pleased about any part of it, drives them back to Baker Street in her own personal Ford Focus, because Sherlock still refuses to ride in a patrol car. John, seated up front, tries to make conversation, since as soon as she unlocked the doors Sherlock slid into the back and went promptly and aggressively silent, ignoring even Jacobs's pointed references to her assorted black belts and her dojo and the last time she took out a suspect three times her size; John tries to maneuver her onto a less fraught topic, but since her other main interests are snooker and getting pissed with her truly terrifying women's five-a-side team and she isn't actually a lesbian, he never really knows how to talk to her. When they pull up outside the flat, he takes the time to thank her for the ride and wish her luck in her next match, so Sherlock's already through the door and up the stairs probably before John's even got his seatbelt off.

"You could try, you know," John calls, taking the stairs two at a time, "to be marginally less of a cock, and perhaps then she'd be marginally less of a—what are you doing?": because Sherlock is lying on his bedroom floor on his stomach with his entire head and torso slid under his bed. There's a creak, and a rustle, and a thump, and then Sherlock wriggles back out again brushing dust off his shirt and trousers, cheeks pleased and pink, and holds up an overlarge external hard drive, with its USB cable dangling.

"I told you," he says, "part of the floor comes up."

John trails him back into the living room. "So this is—related to when you were away, then," he says. Not precisely uncertain.

Sherlock doesn't answer, plugging the drive into his laptop—no, John's laptop, which was closer.

John licks his bottom lip and asks, "Did you—er, recognize his M.O., or."

"Not," says Sherlock, "precisely," without looking up: and then turns John's laptop enough to show him a sun-drenched, squinting snapshot of a very beautiful girl with dark skin and a magenta-streaked halo of curls; a round-shouldered white bloke with a baby in a chest sling; a solid, bearded Asian man in skinny jeans; and—and Sherlock, of course, with spiky bleached-orange hair and a clingy v-neck that bares a slightly indecent proportion of his freckled shoulders and pecs, beaming toothily along with the rest of them, with his arm draped around the shoulders of the bearded bloke to the left. He looks like an entirely different person. Behind them: the Amsterdam sign, and the Rijksmuseum, looming. "Raj," Sherlock says, and then taps the screen just over Bearded Skinny Jeans' chest; then slides his finger over to Nerd Dad. "Or Matt, perhaps."

Raj's arm, John notes, is wrapped around Sherlock, too, his fingertips tucked just into the front pocket of Sherlock's tight low-slung grey trousers. John swallows. "That seems rather... gender-essentialist of you," he says, at last; and Sherlock shakes his head.

"Matt builds custom bicycles," he says, "from stolen parts, too, so he has some technical competency. But Gabrielle—if Gabrielle'd set the bombs, you'd better believe they would've gone off—correctly, when she meant them to, and with actual damage." He straightens. "Raj is a graphic designer. He used to plead technical ignorance to get me to install his iPhone updates."

John squints up at him. "And you—what, got involved with them and their... bomb-making activities?"

"No, they weren't making bombs, then, they were stealing bicycles." Sherlock scrubs at his hair, then flips the laptop back around and starts typing. "It wasn't—it had nothing to do with Moriarty, you know. It was just. A favor for a friend."

A friend. Right. His forger friend, John remembers, lived in Amsterdam. Eva. He wonders, a little cattishly, what she had to say about Raj; and then immediately feels terrible for thinking it. He clears his throat. "And you—turned them in?" It comes out uncertain—more uncertain than he is, really, he thinks. "To the police?"

"Well, yes, once I had enough evidence," Sherlock says. "They were—an annoyance, really. Tourists in crime. Raj'd come to Amsterdam because a city with legal weed and a good nightclub scene was his idea of heaven on earth, Matt'd come because he and Raj were more or less nonfunctional without each other, and then Matt met Gabrielle on some sort of exchange about urban farming and impregnated her in an admirable demonstration of his truly implausible heterosexuality, and by the time I'd got there all three of them'd got troublingly invested in Penoza, despite none of them speaking a word of Dutch, and also developed a terribly clever idea for a custom eco-bike startup, which probably would've been a hit, under any other circumstances, except that they didn't want to actually bother funding it through any of the more traditional routes and decided instead just to steal all of their so-called recycled parts."

John nods. "And you think they're responsible because—because they're Canadian."

His voice curves down, he finds, at the end.

Sherlock hesitates, very slightly. "No," he says. "They're American"; and John shifts. "But my Canadian passport was the most legitimate of my Anglophone identities, at the time," Sherlock explains, "so since I expected I'd have to deal with the police..."

John nods, very slowly. "So it's because they thought you were Canadian."

Sherlock is quiet, a bit. His thumb brushes along the edge of his trackpad, up-down, up-down. "I'm not certain Gabrielle ever wholly believed it," he says, "but she'd grown up in Vermont, just south of the border. But Raj and Matt were from San Diego—I never thought any of them'd've believed I was an American, but I'd thought Canadian would seem plausible enough, to them." He taps at the keyboard a bit more, and John's mobile buzzes in his pocket. "I didn't ever check up," Sherlock says. His voice is light, crisp: John knows him well enough to know it for a lie. "But I imagine that he's out of prison by now."

He turns, looking up at John's face. His muddy-colored eyes. He, John notes. Not they: Sherlock is quite certain, then, that it's Raj.

"Do you," John says, very low; and Sherlock's gaze slithers down to his mouth, his throat, his chest, and then away as he snaps John's laptop shut and pushes up to his feet. Stepping away, shoulders tensed, to grab his coat.

"I've sent the photo to Lestrade, too," Sherlock is saying, "but he won't be able to find him on his own, not quickly, at least. And if he's going to be bombing—the British Museum, and St. Paul's and Madame Tussauds and the sodding London Eye—"

"Yes, best to head that off, I'd think," John says. Watching the bunching curve of Sherlock's hunched spine. "Especially if this is—about you, I mean": and Sherlock straightens, putting his shoulders back, and turns to face him.

"Why should it be about me, then," he says, a little sharp; and John takes a breath.

"Well," John says, and then straightens: in for a penny. "Because he's got no sodding reason to do it otherwise, and because he—I don't know if you were lovers but I can tell you, from that photo, that Raj certainly wanted you to be—probably thought he'd won the lottery, I'd expect, to just happen upon you, thousands of kilometers away from home in a city where he didn't speak the language and didn't really know much of anybody but then turned up a bloke who looked like you and talked like you and installed his iPhone updates for him and—and paid attention to him, didn't you, if you were trying to get enough to hand them over to law enforcement for—what was it, then? Had they taken Eva's own bicycle, or did she just—know about a pattern, and point you in the proper direction?"

Sherlock doesn't answer. Watching, eyes glittering, John's face.

"But either way," John says, a little too fast, "I think to him it looked like his—his California hipster wet dream turned up in the flesh and started listening to him and encouraging him to be chatty and forthcoming and to—to show off for you, didn't he, because they always do, because how could they not? With you so—so I imagine he would've—taken it a bit personally, I'd think." He takes a breath. Steadying. "I mean," John says. "When you reported him to the police."

Sherlock is still looking at John, watching him, with that same searing ravenous expression that burns through John's clothes and John's skin like an IED through paper: "Very well done," Sherlock says, low and hot; and John swallows. He is grabbing the edge of the table, he finds, until the edge cuts into his hand, sharp and implacable and hard: he's hard, he's realizing; he's sodding—aching, cock heavy in his boxers as he is wondering, half-deliriously, if anything has, in fact, changed; or if five years ago when he'd accidentally done something clever if Sherlock'd deigned to praise him for it, if even then, even all that time ago, all that it would've taken was those last three little words: open for me, to put John on his knees.

Sherlock clears his throat. Turning away.

"Lucy Matley," he says; and John blinks. Refocusing, with some difficulty.

"I—yes." He straightens, and then squints at the back of Sherlock's bowed neck. "Who's Lucy Matley?"

"An associate, of a sort," Sherlock says, "of Mycroft's." Not looking back. "I—was employed by her, for a time."

John blinks. "Oh," he says, uncertainly. The impression he'd always got from Vic and Greg and, in fact, from Sherlock himself had been that Sherlock'd gone, quite directly, from being chucked out of Cambridge to a life of pridefully semi-impoverished dissolution, before Greg'd more or less taken on a one-man campaign to make him fit for police consulting, eventually colluding with Mycroft to have him, in fact, sectioned, for a time. John doesn't think Sherlock knows, even now, quite how involved in all of that Greg had been. "You were—when was this?" John asks, because he can't find space for it. A contradiction: unpleasant, really, to find one, just lobbed straight in amongst everything he thought he knew.

"Just after Cambridge," Sherlock says. "For about three and a half weeks." He turns back to John, and then gives him a rueful, lopsided half-smile. "I got arrested for breaking into the labs at Imperial College—again—and she sacked me."

"Ah," John says: so, not a contradiction after all. Comforting. He says, "But—will she help us?": and then watches, almost hypnotized, as a red, painfully bright blush creeps slowly up over Sherlock's throat.

After a moment, Sherlock shrugs one shoulder, then the other. "I consulted with an assistant of hers, for a time," he says: careful, light. "During the trials." He turns away again, bending to poke through the mess of objects on the coffee table as he says, "Quite useful with pairing faces and aliases, her office," and then straightening, and taking an audible breath. "Better fetch your gun," he says, finally, and then stuffs his hands in his pockets.

"Oh." John swallows; "Right, yeah, I'll just": as he waves a hand at the landing, even though Sherlock isn't looking at him. John darts past his back and out, taking the stairs two at a time.

His gun's in his chest of drawers, along with his holster. He slides the holster on and grabs the gun; checks it, quickly; and is just about to tuck it in when he hears the door click shut, down two flights of stairs.

His pulse, against his temple: a throb. A throb.

Another person, he thinks, would probably—doubt, at least for a moment; John doesn't. He slides his gun into his holster and pulls down his jumper and trots down to the first-floor landing and sticks his head into the living room to ask, "Sherlock?" even though he isn't expecting an answer. He doesn't get one. He shuts his teeth again and marches down to the street which is empty with his mobile already tucked up to his ear ringing, ringing, ringing; but Sherlock is gone, doesn't answer; and John is finding that precisely no part of him is surprised.

Notes:  
Sorry about the delay; I've had a cold; I'm still planning 59 for the 13th; let's see if I hate myself for saying that in a week and a half!!


End file.
